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We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.

Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.

In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

Some brains are easy to hack into, and other brains are nearly impossible to hack into because they are so complex.

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.

You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections.

In the entire history of the human species, every tool we've invented has been to expand muscle power. All except one. The integrated circuit, the computer. That lets us use our brain power.